


x

by kuro49



Series: XZ-AO-WMD [5]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Dubious Ethics, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 06:06:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10758267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/pseuds/kuro49
Summary: Hermann solves for the unknown and they find their first crossroad, Newt is just surprised how long it has taken.





	x

**Author's Note:**

> bet you didn’t see this coming (because i sure didn’t). finished mostly on a whim off of what has been bits and pieces written over the course of 4 years now, i almost forgot this is how i used to write like so if this reads as kind of jarring i'm not surprised??
> 
> this can be read with #infidelity if decided to read hermann/newt but this is mostly just hermann pov with a lot of vague behind the scenes bad science.

 

At the height of the era of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, Dr. Hermann Gottlieb meets Dr. Newton Geiszler, and it is not entirely hate at first sight.

Before that, they write each other letters that are distinctively not love letters. It is a correspondence in knowledge and research in fields that wouldn’t have overlapped at crucial points of their academic careers if it weren’t for the Kaiju War.

When the theoretical becomes applicable, the world brings him to him. There are endings before any beginnings are to start, and this is one of them. Whether anyone is still left alive at the end, well, that’s not an answer the good doctors have.

 

There are lines to be drawn and the unknown to be solved for.

For him, there is little else that mattered when the world decides to end on a whim and all he has is a chalkboard filled with numbers. Numbers are absolute. What he does with them is not.

What comes after can be marked with _x_.

 

Hermann becomes engaged to Vanessa two years into the war.

And they marry in three.

She takes his last name, and he thinks he is the luckiest man alive.

Newton sends a letter of the congratulatory nature at the news, and has all the confidence that his friend, Dr. Gottlieb will understand his absence from the ceremony when he has only just received the funding for his research from the PPDC.

Hermann responds, and ends his with _Vanessa sends her thanks_.

 

She lives inland whiles he lives on bases along the Pacific Rim.

He goes where the Jaeger Programs goes, and she doesn’t have to like it to live with it. Her belly steadily swells, and Hermann’s not good with words. But Vanessa is good with reading her husband and she can see the way his eyes crinkle in the corners through the secured PPDC channel.

What Vanessa Gottlieb does not see is that Kaiju Blue is like a dye, it stains everything it comes into contact with.

 

They are what will become of the K-Science department in those last days even if they do not know it yet. They meet the first of the XZs long before they know the extent of the blue bleeding into the water or the amount of it being left behind, vaporized in the air. She is barely fourteen and looking so much younger with how small she is, sitting so close to Ranger Sevier and glancing around for the other half of Coyote Tango.

Hermann Gottlieb and Newton Geiszler are behind concrete and steel when they meet Mako Mori in a facility two miles from the Academy on Kodiak Island.

This is also the first time they meet each other face-to-face.

 

Newton is never careful, the blue staining everything there is in the lab, or maybe he is just deliberate. Hermann has considered this once.

 

The two of them do not attempt an artificial drift until those final moments of what is probably the end.

They can hardly imagine what the drift can do. How do they imagine a hivemind in active construction? Mako does not have the words for it, and neither one of them can begin to prompt for a fraction of what she sees like a vivid painting at work in the back of her mind. When one mind connects to the next and the next and the next one after for a whisper and a flash of colours that do not exist in this world.

Mako sits on the stool, swinging her legs, not looking one bit fazed at the sterility of everything. But how automatic it is for her, extending an arm for the draw of another sample of her blood, Hermann is reminded that this is not a world any child should have to grow up in while his hands are gloved in latex.

Hermann has seen those infected coughing up blue vapours in decontamination, has seen what little he can actually do to stop the spread of an acidic blue that bites and bites through it all. He has heard the first responders calling it bloodmist as they bring in another one from the Exclusion Zone. Watching that steady rise of the concentration of blue toxin in their blood.

And just how helpless he is in all of it.

Hermann looks to Mako as she gives him a tentative smile and has to wonder if she is the start or the end of the human race. He has to wonder if he is the one to draw any kind conclusion on what is neither a hypothesis nor an experiment but a trial and error that have no end.

 

He wants to save the world.

But don’t they all?

(This world only needs so many saviours.)

Hermann doesn’t have a direct hand in the codes for the drift sequence, that is all on Dr. Caitlin Lightcap but every single part of the Mark I Jaeger programming has been through Hermann Gottlieb’s desk and even he can tell you, regardless of the numbers, the organic basis to every drift cannot be recreated.

“She is not—” Hermann starts, anger rising.

“You don’t think I know that, Hermann?” Newt shoots back in German, like it matters at all even if she does understand them. “She is the closest we have.”

“She is not _them_.”

Hermann hisses and ends it at that.

It is the decade long debate, that same old question asked over and over again in different words. This is where they reach their first crossroad. Hermann learns the cost to finding the answer he seeks and that the end does not justify the means, Newt is just surprised it has taken this long.

 

The first line drawn is wiped away.

Hermann finds that even the worst of the blue can be cleaned up.

Mako Mori is not the only XZ the PPDC has.

 

Hermann associates Newton with a hatred that consumes, Vanessa as such a good thing, the only good that he’s got that isn’t chalk dust on his hands. And it is not a hit but a slow, ugly thing that crawls beneath his skin when she smiles at him.

What he believes he will remember from this war, of this war, is a hand in the Jaeger codes and the stain of Kaiju blood on his clothes. What remains in a world built on the carcass of an alien species is the glow of phosphorescence in the dark.

The alarm sounds in warning of the triple event. It sounds final if nothing else.

 


End file.
